From the Continent: The Samizdat

From such good listening posts as Vienna and West Berlin, it is possible to get a fair picture of the opposition forces active in the Soviet Union. In either city one can occasionally obtain copies of literature from samizdat (short for samo-izdatelstvo, which means “self-publishing company”). Of course, such a company does not actually exist, but there are anonymous publishers, anonymous printers—or, rather, copyists who work with typewriters, carbons, stencils, and, in some cases, with tape recorders—all the dangerous and relentless enemies of the Soviets. Equivalents of samizdat exist also among non-Russians, especially in the Ukraine and in Georgia, and among the Balts.

Samizdat encompasses whatever opposes the regime and covers all sorts of currents-—liberal-democratic, Christian, conservative, neo-Marxist, and nationalist, among others. It publishes Russian novels that cannot be printed in Russia (the newer books by Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, etc.), translations from foreign languages (Kafka, Joyce, Samuel Beckett), philosophical works of older vintage (Berdyayev, Leontyev, Solovyov), and, of course, poetry new and old (Mandelstam, Yesenin, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva), as well as fairly recent political works like an essay by the Soviet economist Eugene Varga (who died in 1964), in which he foretold a dire future for the Soviet Union. On tape one can get the sad, desperate songs of Mulat Okuchava and the more aggressive ones by Aleksandr Galich, all accompanied by the balalaika.

EK

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Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

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From such good listening posts as Vienna and West Berlin, it is possible to get a fair picture of the opposition forces active in the Soviet Union. In either city one can occasionally obtain copies of literature from samizdat (short for samo-izdatelstvo, which means “self-publishing company”). Of course, such a company does not actually exist, but there are anonymous publishers, anonymous printers—or, rather, copyists who work with typewriters, carbons, stencils, and, in some cases, with tape recorders—all the dangerous and relentless enemies of the Soviets. Equivalents of samizdat exist also among non-Russians, especially in the Ukraine and in Georgia, and among the Balts.

Samizdat encompasses whatever opposes the regime and covers all sorts of currents-—liberal-democratic, Christian, conservative, neo-Marxist, and nationalist, among others. It publishes Russian novels that cannot be printed in Russia (the newer books by Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, etc.), translations from foreign languages (Kafka, Joyce, Samuel Beckett), philosophical works of older vintage (Berdyayev, Leontyev, Solovyov), and, of course, poetry new and old (Mandelstam, Yesenin, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva), as well as fairly recent political works like an essay by the Soviet economist Eugene Varga (who died in 1964), in which he foretold a dire future for the Soviet Union. On tape one can get the sad, desperate songs of Mulat Okuchava and the more aggressive ones by Aleksandr Galich, all accompanied by the balalaika.